Develop Database For Future

• Do you write TSQL statements which do not end with a semicolon?
• Do you use system tables or system procedures in your code?
• Is your code contains ANSI settings?
• Do you have text, ntext or image columns in your databases? 

Your database is having a danger. The above list is just a few of the massive list of items marked for deprecation. The best option is now itself startchanging them to the new standards. Add them for your standards and whenever you need to change the code to add a functionality or to remove a bug, change the things marked for deprecation also. To my surprise, the vardecimal storage format, whcih came with SQL Server 2005 sp2, is also marked for deprecation.

Check the complete list here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx

When talking about writing for future, we also need to consider about reserved keywords. Microsoft keeps on adding new reserved keywords to the list, where words like “LineNo” and “National” are reserved keywords already. The recommended practice is to use them enclosed with square brackets (for example , [Description]). Unfortunately, a word which was not a keyword now, can become one in the next release. So, how can we prevent this? Gogula gave a nice answer in his recent presentation: “Always enclose with square brackets”.

Read about it more here: http://dbantics.blogspot.com/2009/08/t-sql-best-practices-and-coding.html

Finally, beware of less used features. They are most likely the candidates for deprecation. You all know what happened to notification services right?

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